Alien whitespace eating nanovirus strikes again!

Martijn Faassen faassen at pop.vet.uu.nl
Wed Jun 2 06:00:42 EDT 1999


Hi there,

I don't intend to start a flamewar or anything, and I'm sure Larry Wall
is a nice guy, and Perl is nice and all, and the postmodern
rationalisation of the confusion that Perl is to me is *fun* (but does
not work for me), but Larry Wall seems to be infected by the whitespace
eating nanovirus meme. From an interview at:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/issue61/3394.html

Interviewer:  In what way is Perl better than other scripting languages
such as Python and Eiffel? 

[Eiffel a 'scripting language'? hm]

[Larry Wall:]
[Perl is postmodern]
> That is, if something's worth doing, it's worth driving into the ground to the
> exclusion of all other approaches. Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp or 
> the use of white space as syntax in Python. Or the mandatory use of objects in
> many languages, including Java. All of these are ways of taking freedom away
> from the end user ``for their own good''. They're just versions of Orwell's
> Newspeak, in which it's impossible to think bad thoughts. We escaped from the
> fashion police in the 1970s, but many programmers are still slaves of the cyber
> police.
[Perl is postmodern and therefore allows freedom]

One could say the same about Perl and it requiring it curly braces
around blocks? In fact, I heard the claim that its requirement to use
curly braces around single line blocks (unlike C which allows you to
remove them) makes Perl less prone to errors. And Perl excludes the use
of meaningful whitespace indentation! (python does allow #{ and #}
blocks ;)

Okay, I *will* say the same about Perl and its curly braces requirement:

} That is, if something's worth doing, it's worth driving into the
ground to the
} exclusion of all other approaches. Look at the use of curly braces in
} Perl.

*any* language makes it impossible to code in some ways, and encourages
other coding styles, Perl included. Python, for instance, allows
procedural and object oriented coding styles; and people keep trying for
functional styles as well. We've even started using 'assembler style' by
manipulating Python bytecodes! Silly, silly, whitespace meme.

People think bad thoughts in Python all the time (see the 'evil hacks'
threads showing up regularly). It's just that we have the sense to
recognize the bad thoughts for what they are. I suppose that's why
'advisory locking' of member data is good enough for Python. :)

Okay, sorry for all this, it's out of line, I just needed to blow off
steam. :)

Regards,

Martijn




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